If you’ve seen just one of the many tired and uninspired spy spoof movies from the 1960s, then nothing in Modesty Blaise will be much of a surprise.
I spy with my little eye… something that stinks
If you’ve seen just one of the many tired and uninspired spy spoof movies from the 1960s, then nothing in Modesty Blaise will be much of a surprise.
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#1 by RogerBW on December 16, 2019 - 7:02 am
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I have ranted at length elsewhere on why I generally don’t think adaptations are a good idea, but in short: each medium has storytelling modes that work in it and others that don’t. If you take a story from one medium to another, in order to make it work in the new one you pretty much have to rewrite it, and it may well be that whatever made the thing good in the first place won’t survive the process.
It doesn’t help in this case that the film was made as a generic Italian Eurospy spoof, and Modesty Blaise basically isn’t that at all. So it lost the fans there even before the general lack of plot and action kicked in for everyone else.
(I do recommend My Name Is Modesty from 2003. It was made DTV purely in order for the rightsholder to be able to keep the property locked up, for less money than one of Monica Vitti’s wigs, but it was also made by someone who’d actually read the stories, and with a lead clearly regarding it as her one big chance. Alas, she hasn’t had all that much work since.)
#2 by David Lee Ingersoll on December 18, 2019 - 7:34 am
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Modesty Blaise, the comic strip, ran in the San Francisco Chronicle when I was a kid. My local library also had a few of the novels. I enjoyed both. I caught the middle of this movie on TV one day and was really, really disappointed.